I slid the dissolution papers across the table the moment Dante Moretti dropped his voice low, sweet-talking the fifty-second girl on the other end of the line.

"Dante. Let's end this."

"Sign it, wait out the thirty-day cooling period, and once it's done, we go our separate ways. No more ties."

He gave a flat mm, took the folder without looking, flipped straight to the last page, and scrawled his name with the same lazy authority he used to initial shipping manifests he'd never read.

Then he stood, reached for his overcoat draped across the arm of the leather chair, and kept talking to the girl on the phone.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm coming to you right now, okay?"

The call ended. He was already at the door of the study, one hand on the brass knob, when something made him glance back at me.

"Oh, right, Vera. What was that thing you just had me sign?"

He'd already signed it. And only now did it occur to him to ask.

I tugged at the corner of my mouth. The smile that formed was pure acid.

"The dis—"

Before I could finish, he waved me off, impatient.

"Listen, if you want to buy another property just go ahead and buy it. You don't need to bring me a contract every time. I've got someone to deal with here. I've been home with you for days and the girl's already throwing fits."

It hit me then. He hadn't heard a single word. He thought it was just another real-estate agreement.

And really, why wouldn't he.

In the past, whenever we fought our worst, my favorite retaliation was to burn through his money on entire rows of villas. The housing market had been bleeding out for years, but I'd still pour tens of millions of cleaned cash into dying developments, just to punish him, just to vent the pain and fury I couldn't hold inside anymore.

Back then, I still had expectations of him. That thin, stubborn thread of love kept me from accepting that he had already turned away from me, and so I shattered, again and again, and fell into despair, again and again.

But when exactly had he started to change.

I remembered the first time we met. It was at a bar in the old neighborhood.

I'd gone to pick up a friend and happened to catch him drunk, barely standing, about to go down hard. I steadied him out of simple decency.

He lifted his head and looked at me. Just that one look, and he decided I was his.

The name Dante Moretti was never unfamiliar in our world. Blood heir of the Moretti Family, born with the sharp, reckless face of a man who thought rules were suggestions. The women around him rotated every three days. Half the city's daughters had bruised their hearts on him at one point or another.

I didn't want to be one of them. I didn't want anything to do with a man like that, so I refused him from the start.

But he didn't give up. If anything, he sank deeper, clinging to me with a stubbornness that bordered on obsession, his eyes unable to settle on anyone else.

Valentine's Day, he filled an entire piazza with flowers. To make me smile, he lit fireworks over the harbor that burned until dawn. And every single time I was low, he appeared, right on time.

Under that kind of relentless pursuit, my heart, which had never once stirred for anyone, cracked open, piece by piece.

After we were together, he really did pull back.

No more drifting from woman to woman. He reported his schedule without being asked, told me everywhere he went.

Everyone said he'd straightened out for me. They said there was nothing more precious than a wild man who finally came home.

I believed it.

So when he went down on one knee, eyes rimmed red, and asked me to be his wife, I said yes almost without hesitation.

But the marriage wasn't even a year old before he started tangling with other women again.

We fought countless times.

I stood in the wreckage of the living room, screaming, hysterical, like someone who'd lost her mind completely. And he just pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, face heavy with exhaustion.

In the end, he even made an offer so absurd it made my chest go hollow.

"Vera, I love you. But staying faithful to one person for a lifetime… it gets stale."

"We each have our fun. We don't catch feelings for anyone on the outside. And when we've had enough, we come back to the family. Okay?"

I refused.

He carried on exactly as he pleased.

Slowly, I was pushed to the edge of collapse.

I started fighting back the same way he did.

I took a young man under my wing. Maeve Vitale. A quiet-blooded son of the Vitale Family, still finishing his years at the university, the kind of face that turned heads across every room he entered.

At first, it was nothing but spite.

But he would call me sorella in that gentle voice. He would coax me back from the ledge with patience I had forgotten existed. And when I was at my most helpless, he was the first one through the door.

The car accident. I lay in a hospital bed in a private clinic the Vitale family kept off the books, and he sat beside me, eyes rimmed red, staying through every follow-up examination without once being asked.

He was clean. Pure. Like a shaft of light that carried no impurity at all.

Over time, my heart, torn and riddled with wounds, was mended by him piece by careful piece.

I had offered him a house. Money. Whatever I could give.

He wanted none of it.

He wanted only a name. A place beside me that the world would recognize.

"Sorella, divorce him. Try me."

He looked at me, his gaze clear and steady, as though his eyes had room for only one person. And in those eyes, the woman reflected back was not the wretched, humiliated version of myself I had come to accept. She was glowing.

In that moment, something finally clicked into place.

When a thing is broken, you replace it. Even a child understands that. Yet I had wasted years grinding myself down inside this alliance.

Everything between Dante Moretti and me had only ever been slow self-destruction.

So I said yes.

Yes to being with Maeve Vitale.

And yes to ending, once and for all, a marriage that lay in ruins around my feet.

Dante had barely left the estate when my phone lit up with Maeve's video call.

On the screen, he wore a clean white shirt, moving through a kitchen with quiet efficiency. A few strands of dark hair fell across his forehead, and his lashes were long, giving him that look that was both gentle and disarming.

"Sorella, is it done? The divorce?"

I was older than him. I had lived through things he could only imagine. And still, every time I saw that face, my pulse quickened against my will.

I cleared my throat, forcing my voice to stay even.

"The agreement is signed. One more month, and he and I have no connection left."

He listened, and slowly the corner of his mouth curved upward. His voice dropped low, threaded with a pleasure he could not quite contain.

"Since there's no connection anymore, then for this month, sorella, you don't let him touch you."

The words were soft, but underneath them ran a possessiveness that left no room for argument.

"When the time comes, I'll be checking."

I hadn't expected Maeve to say something like that. Heat crept across my cheeks, but I kept my expression flat and scolded him with all the composure I could manage. "Don't talk nonsense."

On the other end, he watched me, his gaze carrying an undisguised hunger he reined in a heartbeat later, his tone shifting to something wounded and clinging. "Sorella, the only thing small about me is my age. Everything else… isn't small at all."

My chest tightened. I cut him off before the conversation could slip any further, coaxed him with a few gentle words, and finally got him to hang up like a good boy.

This young man was everything I could want. Except that he clung to me like a vine.

The moment the call ended, I went out and bought a calendar.

For the month that followed, I lived by tearing off pages, counting each day on my fingers.

From October first to the tenth, Dante did not come back to the compound once.

But where he went, who he was with, what he was doing. I knew all of it with perfect clarity.

His new woman, Serena Bellucci, was a hostess at one of the Moretti-owned clubs. A girl who had started as an intern of sorts in the family's legitimate front. Every day she would post something on her social media, carefully casual, dropping hints about the two of them. As if she were marking territory.

An afternoon spent at a private dining room in the kind of restaurant where the maître d' never wrote down a reservation. An evening at the golf course the family kept for entertaining judges and politicians. Standing on the terrace of a hilltop villa, looking down at the city lights. Sharing a private hot spring at a resort that only took guests with the right last name.

Strange, really. With Dante's habits, he never lingered on one woman for long. The ones who came and went before had held his attention for a month at most before he grew bored.

But this Serena Bellucci had already lasted three months, and he still hadn't grown tired of her.

Perhaps it was that unusual longevity that gave her the nerve. She stopped playing quiet the way the others had. She even added me on my private line, testing, prodding, in that careful way of hers that looked like nothing and meant everything.

I didn't let it bother me.

I had already decided to dissolve the alliance. Why waste energy on petty games.

Over the next few days, with nothing else to occupy my time, I cleaned the estate from top to bottom.

The straight razors I'd chosen for him at a custom shop in Milan. The suits he wore every day, the ones I'd pressed with my own hands and hung in garment bags before each sit-down. The limited-edition Patek Philippe I'd stayed up half the night outbidding three other buyers to secure.

It didn't matter what it was worth. If I had given it to him, I boxed it up and threw it out.

What I threw out with it was every humiliation this marriage had asked me to swallow, and every piece of my heart I had handed over without holding anything back.

I had made up my mind. A clean break from the past. A fresh start.

Two more days passed before he finally came back.

He stood in the main room of the estate, scanning the shelves and surfaces that were visibly emptier than before, and his brow creased. "Vera, you threw out my things?"

I kept turning the pages of the magazine in my lap, didn't look up. "I did."

"I bought them. I can throw them away if I want. Is there a problem? Besides, you're never home. No point keeping things that collect dust."

He clearly assumed I was still angry about the last incident. Took it for spite, nothing more.

He walked over and sat down beside me, his tone carrying that careless, half-hearted reassurance he always reached for. "Didn't we agree a long time ago? We each do what we want outside these walls, and neither of us catches feelings for anyone else. Why are you making an issue of it again?"

The same speech. Always the same speech.

No matter what he did, he could always find a way to excuse himself. And I, his wife in name, was supposed to absorb every wound he inflicted in silence, as though even voicing a grievance was excessive.

But now, I had no interest in tangling with him over things that no longer mattered.

I closed the magazine, stood, and headed for the stairs. My voice was cold enough to freeze the air between us. "You're overthinking it. I don't care."

He took that for a mask. Thought I was pretending not to feel anything. He was on his feet instantly, catching my hand.

Under my gaze, which held nothing but impatience, he reached into his jacket and pulled out an invitation, pressing it into my palm.

"Stop being angry. Tomorrow I'll take you to the auction. Whatever catches your eye, bid on it. Relax a little, all right?"

My first instinct was to refuse.

But when my eyes landed on the Sotheby's crest embossed on the card, I changed my mind.

We were getting a dissolution anyway. Spending his money on something that made me happy wasn't a loss.

So I nodded.

At five o'clock the next afternoon, his car pulled up to the estate gates right on time.

I carried my bag downstairs and was reaching for the door handle when I saw a familiar face.

Serena Bellucci.

She sat in the passenger seat clutching a large bag of snacks and bottled water, settled in as though she belonged there, and smiled at me with that wide, innocent expression of hers.

"Signora, I get a little carsick. Would you mind sitting in the back today?"

The flash of triumph in her eyes didn't escape me. I lowered my gaze, and in my peripheral vision I caught the small ornament mounted on the dashboard.

A custom Hello Kitty figurine. The tiny bow on its head bore a line of cursive lettering.

Princess Serena's seat.

I didn't speak. I didn't step aside.

Dante seemed to sense the shift in my mood. Once again, that low, impatient coaxing. "Serena's never been to an auction. I'm just showing her how the other half lives. She's delicate, Vera. Let her have the seat."

Let her?

Of course I could.